If you are developing application with Netbeans in Ubuntu Unity environment, most likely the Netbeans menu is black (hard to spot) and in bold text (ugly). And this things effecting all java program. It is due to the ambience theme employed by Ubuntu which result in menu black and bold. And not only that, because the new Unity is using Unity Launcher and Global menu, all java application will looks weird on that environment eg: no global menu, wrong launcher icon, not integrated into Unity HUD, etc

So how to fix that. The menu black things can be solved by changing the ambience theme into another theme or you can edit the ambience theme resources definition file. But the global menu and HUD integration is harder to workaround.

Luckily if you are using Netbeans you can just use Java Ayatana plugin which solve all the problem above. Java Ayatana will integrate Netbeans nicely with Ubuntu Unity eg: Ubuntu global menu, Ubuntu HUD integration, Unity launcher fix, etc.

27 Responses to “Netbeans and Ubuntu Unity”

This didn’t work for me. Using Ubuntu 12.04 and Netbeans 7.1.2. The plugin installed OK and it shows as active after a Netbeans restart, but the menu is still on the application and not in the global menu.

UPDATE! It turns out that I couldn’t get it working because I was using Java 6 JDK/JRE and I needed to use Java 7.

Install it with ‘sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk’ and then edit the netbeans.conf file (/usr/local/netbeans-7.1.2/etc/netbeans.conf on my system) to use the new java version ‘netbeans_jdkhome=”/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.7.0-openjdk-i386/jre”‘

I just installed Netbeans 7.0.1 in Ubuntu 12.04. I suggest that the easiest way to make the Netbeans menu bar readable is by opening the Apppearance Window in System Settings and changing the Theme from “Ambiance” to “Radiance”.